


from wishes and stars and dreams

by duckiesandlemons



Category: Yu-Gi-Oh! ARC-V
Genre: Alternate Universe - Creatures & Monsters, Dream Creatures, M/M, Surrealism, ygoshipolympics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-18
Updated: 2015-07-18
Packaged: 2018-04-09 20:44:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 5,027
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4363556
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/duckiesandlemons/pseuds/duckiesandlemons
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>And he's a being made from dreams and wishes and stardust, born to protect the human he's attached to from the monsters that lurk in the dark.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Dawn

**Author's Note:**

> Surreal AUs are my specialty, actually.
> 
> Written for the challenge Thrilling + Games for ygoshipolympics.

Yuuya saves a bird, once.

It’s singing beautiful music, serene and light.  He remembers this bird, its plumage dark with soft shades of blue and white.  He remembers how it sat outside his window every day.

He saves a bird, once.  

From having its wings clipped, having been knocked from its perch by some local neighborhood kids who didn’t know any better.  He had patched it with plain white bandages that he decorated in colorful marker, let it stay, and one day when its wing had healed it flew away.

(Away--far, far away)

 

**01**

Yuuya saves a man, once.

He had been stumbling through the streets at night, coat tattered, bandages loosely hanging from his limbs.  He remembers how the man falls, palms slamming into the concrete of the sidewalk and blood dripping red.

He saves a man, once.

From the monsters that had chased him, had reached out with gripping claws and latched in deep.  Yuuya had grabbed this man, lifted him up, and ran.  There had been warm blood on his palm, the roughness of callused hands against his, and uttered words:

“You didn’t have to save me again.”

Yuuya doesn’t know what he means--he just knows that whatever is chasing them needs to be as far away as possible.

They barely reach Yuuya’s apartment complex in time, Yuuya shoving the door open and tossing this man in, slamming the door shut and cringing as something slams against it.  There’s a gnarled hiss, silence, and Yuuya hears the sound of sharp claws scraping against the ground.

He breathes.

“What do you mean again?” are the first words out of his mouth as he turns to look at this man.

This man with sharp gold eyes and black and blue hair, hands re-wrapping bandages in irritation.  They’re stained red.

“Don’t answer that, let me just change your--”

“It’s fine,” the man snaps.  “I’m fine.”

You’re not, Yuuya wants to say, but the most he can do in the end is force the man to stay and rest up.  He crashes on Yuuya’s couch once they get into his apartment, not even taking off his ragged coat or beat up boots.  He’s awfully rude, but--

The man is gone in the morning when Yuuya wakes up, having left.  The lock to his door is undone.

He had left.

(Far, far away)

  
**02**

Since that night, Yuuya has become more perceptive to the possibility of these...monsters.  To things not real and yet all too real entirely.  He’s seen things that normal humans can’t--or are willingly blind to--see.  Small creatures born from shadow plodding after children.  Larger, thinner creatures that seemed more like spindles, towering over people as they walked underneath.

And then something darker, lurking in the cramped alley ways and staring as people passed.

They’re the ones that Yuuya remembers the most.

They’re the ones that had tried to kill that man.

“You shouldn’t look too close,” a voice says.  He looks up to see a woman with green eyes, a face strikingly similar to his best friend’s, and elegant purple hair tied up with ornate gems that sparkle like stars in her hair.  She’s leaning out the window of the building he’s in front of, face passive.

“Why not?”

“They’re creatures not really meant to be seen by humans,” she makes a claw with one hand.  “They eat and they snatch at flesh and bone--”

“But before--”

“Lucky,” she tells him.  “Most wouldn’t have survived.  Then again, not like _he’d_ want you to have died quite like that.”

He--that man.

“So what are they, then?” he asks.  

“...imagination,” she tells him.  “Simple as that.”

“And your name?”

“Serena.”

And she disappears as quickly as she appeared.

  
**03**

Yuuya doesn’t see the man again until late at night.  Classes had run late and he had missed the last bus.  Usually, Yuuya wouldn’t walk this late at night.  Usually, he wouldn’t even think of walking home in the dark like this and would crash at Yuzu’s place.  Things are different this time, however, pressed by an urgency to get home because school work had piled up.

He’s running past an alley when it happens.

A creature lunges, sends him careening, and Yuuya’s looking into an open maw, shadow fangs dripping sludge like spit onto Yuuya’s shirt.  

His heart leaps into his throat, fear bubbling and _he doesn’t want to die please don’t let me die._

The creature yelps, however, suddenly sent flying off of Yuuya’s body.  He hears the sound of its body hitting the ground, claws skittering across the pavement, and another shadow briefly passes over his eyes.  Brilliant black wings, barely noticeable in the dark of night, streaked with blue and white, flash before him.

It’s shortly followed by the screech of a beast in the throes of death, a shrill roar that sends shivers up Yuuya’s spine.

He gets up, knees shaking and body aching.  He had almost died, he had almost been _eaten_ by this monster that lurks in the dark.  How is he...why is he…

Yuuya looks up at the sound of foot steps, that man he had saved walking out of the alley.  There’s black smeared across his cheek, gold eyes sharpened into a gaze that pushes through Yuuya, makes him feel naked and vulnerable.  He approaches Yuuya, one step at a time, still wearing that ratty coat Yuuya remembers meeting him in, still in those same worn boots, and still wearing those same bloodied bandages.  

He holds a hand out, “To return the favor from before.”

“That’s...thank you?”

Yuuya takes the offered hand.  He feels the same calluses, the same dried blood, coupled with the rough feel of the bandages--it’s almost unnerving.

“What are you?” Yuuya finds himself asking once he’s standing up.  “And what’s that--I--”

That Serena woman had said “imagination.”

Yuuya thinks it’s something else.

“Kurosaki Shun,” the man ends up saying, and walks off after a minute of silence.  It answers nothing, and Yuuya wants to chase after him because a _name_ doesn’t answer what the man--what Kurosaki Shun-- _is_.

 

 


	2. Morning

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> And so he lives anew

He had been attached to a human, once.

He remembers having spied him through the window of some non-descript building, playing out fantasies and stories born from the depths of the human mind.  Laughing, smiling, and doing whatever it is human children do--it had been _endearing_.

So he stayed.

He would perch outside this human’s (Sakaki Yuuya as he has been called) window, watch with curious eyes, and sing simple songs.  Songs that always seemed to attract Yuuya’s attention without fail.

“What type of bird is it?”

“Oh, I’m not sure...but what interesting color it has.”

But he had stayed, observed, and watched until one day he had lost flight in his wing--struck by petty humans who had nothing better to do.

(And perhaps this is why he’s reminded why he loathes them so, how he shouldn’t be so attached to just one)

Yuuya had saved him, had brought him in and patched him up, let him recover, but he knew.

He knew that his wing wouldn’t heal, that he wouldn’t last long, and so when the time came he flew.

(Away--far, far away)

 

**01**

“You’re an interesting creature,” the woman (Serena, she had introduced herself as) tells him when she finds him struggling to even stand.  “Such determination--it’s kind of endearing.”  She picks him up, his wings draped over her hands and tiny body shivering.

Weak, he’s so weak.

“You grew attached to one, didn’t you?”

So tired.

“Poor thing--you’ll become something else if I don’t tend to you now.”

And Serena does something, he’s not sure, but he wakes up with too human limbs, too human body.  The bandages that Yuuya had tied around his wing now hang loosely from his arm, and the tips of his finger are slightly pointed.

“You--”

He looks at this woman, dressed in regal reds and wearing gems in her hair like stars.

“Welcome to your new life, Kurosaki Shun.”

  
**02**

Shun doesn’t know what Serena is as much as he isn’t sure what he is anymore.  Once animal, now man, and now something more.

“I don’t think it’s my place to say anything,” she tells him, daintily sipping from a cup of tea while surrounded by bottles of different shapes and sizes filled with pulsing balls of gaseous light.  Tiny nebulas she keeps trapped, surrounding herself in a beauty that doesn’t seem to fit her.  “Just know that you’re saved and with new purpose.”

“New purpose.”

“Defender, maybe?  Or an avenger.  That sounds rather cool.”

Not really.

“But you know, you’re born from wishes,” Serena tells him.  “Wishes and stars and dreams.”

It’s the cheesiest shit he’s ever been told.

But there’s some truth to it, he thinks as he stares at his hands.  At how he doesn’t have quite human hands or how it’s still easy to just think about flying and then there’s wings.  There’s nothing normal about him, a plain bird turned human turned grotesque beast because Serena finds beauty in the most grotesque of things.

 

_Or is it perhaps that she does not find beauty in anything, this woman who keeps nebulae collected in glass_   _bottles._

“I brought you back by your own will, you know,” she tells him.  “A human that you like, that you want to see, even in your dying moments it’s a dream you held on to strongly.”

“Prying into my personal life now?”

“You don’t exactly make yourself a closed book,” her voice is flat.  “But a dream like yours--how could I possibly eat that?”

  
**03**

He’s saved by Yuuya again.

Serena tells him everything she possibly thinks of telling him, past what makes up his bones besides “cosmic dust and pulsing energy that makes up the blood in your veins.”  How that with his existence, how he was made, he can see and interact with things that normal humans can’t.

“Imagination,” she tells him, blunt in her own way.  “Creatures that love humans, dreams that follow them.”

He notices the tiny creatures nestled around her feet, small wisps of things peeking out from underneath the hem of her dress.  

“What does that have to do with me?”

“They’re precious things, you should protect them.”

“I won’t.”

“You will.”

She says it with such finality it makes him leave.  Of course, he isn’t prepared for the beast that attacks him.  Causes other creatures to scatter and gouges deep lines into his shoulder.  There’s blood--red and bright--and the bandages come undone.

(It’s irritating, how much he’s attached to them even though they’re just remnants from another life from a human he won’t even see again)

Shun runs, because he’s not sure what he’s to do, and he runs--

And runs--

And runs--

Until his legs give out and he’s stumbling.

Yuuya saves him again, grabbing his hand and running until they both end up in some new building.  With how old Yuuya looks now, Shun wonders how many years it has been since Serena has brought him back.

Shun refuses the offer to change bandages, still attached to these that have colorful marker drawn in them, now stained with blood.  He does accept the offer to stay.

In the morning, he leaves.

(Far, far away)

  
**04**

“The human you’re enamored with is quite cute.”

Shun’s forced to help clean around the place Serena stays at, and the broom he’s holding almost snaps.

Serena laughs, “But I guess it’s not really enamored as it is protective.”

“You shouldn’t be saying anything,” he says.

Serena laughs again.

But he gets the chance to run into Yuuya again later, much later, when Shun has adjusted and Serena’s told him that those darker monsters--shadows that feast and prey--are a darkness that he can fight back against.  After all, he’s kind of like them, born from wishes and dreams and stars.

“What are you?”

“Kurosaki Shun.”

Because what else is Shun supposed to tell him?


	3. Noon

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Imagination and Reality intertwine

“You again,” when Yuuya looks up the woman, Serena, is looking down at him.  “You pass by here an awful lot.”

“It’s on my way to school,” kind of.  In a ways he’s hoping that passing by here will get him the chance to see Kurosaki Shun again.  

Serena has her head propped on her hand, expression still the same as when he first saw her.  “You should come in,” she tells him.  “I’d like to talk.”

“But I’ll be late for school--”

“A day is nothing in the long years of your life ahead.”

He...can’t say anything to that now, can he?  So Yuuya waits for her to come down and let him in.  She’s still wearing those gems like stars in her hair, and the red of her dress is stunning.

“You’re Shun’s friend,” she says this as if she’s already known about Yuuya from the get go.

“Yeah,” kind of.  He looks at where she sits, surrounded by glass bottles filled with glittering lights--like the night sky placed into one frail object.  An attempt at containing the beauty it all has to offer.  When he looks at her feet he notices tiny creatures, small and wispy, like cotton, peeking out from under the hem of her dress.

“Hmm,” she looks at him with amused eyes, and she looks so much like Yuzu it’s startling.  “I can see why he’s attached.”

“Excuse me?” Yuuya blinks in confusion.  “I’m not sure--”

“Come here.”

And so he leans close, not expecting her to lean in and kiss him.

  
**01**

“You met with Serena?”

Yuuya had managed to find Shun again, the man lurking somewhere on the south end of town.  It had been humorous, seeing Shun leaning against the wall and covered in small creatures with long tails.  Although they had all fled when Yuuya approached.

“I did, uhm,” Yuuya is hesitant before he sits next to Shun.  “Earlier...what were those?”

“...Disappointment, Reality,” Shun says this with as much crypticness as Serena had.  “They’re hard to explain.”

“And these little guys?” Yuuya’s scratching one of the creatures that had dared to come close again underneath the chin.

“Imagination.”

Just like Serena had answered.

“That’s all a bit confusing.”

“The world is confusing.”

“And you’re really cynical.”

Shun shrugs.

“But...Serena kissed me, is that normal first meeting?” he continues.  Shun’s staring at him now.

“Not really,” Shun says.  “She must like you more than she lets on--or she gave you something.  Her kind is weird like that.”

Yuuya notes how Shun says “kind,” as if Serena is something not human even though she looks every bit human.  She’s not like Shun, who Yuuya doesn’t even know what he is.

“But is there something else to call these?” Yuuya asks.  The creature he had been petting had crawled into his lap.

“Dreams,” Shun’s answer comes easily again, “and Nightmares.”

There’s a warning growl from somewhere, Yuuya looking around only to spot one of those shadow beasts (reptilian this time, long and thin and hostile) coming towards them.  The...dream...in his lap jumps, running away.  Yuuya is ready to run with it, but Shun is already moving.

What Yuuya sees sends a shiver up his spine, some sharp feeling that makes him stare in awe as Shun’s body is enveloped in wings and feathers.

Black with blue and white.

(Yuuya had saved a bird, once)

This monster that Shun has become, wings and sharp beak and talons, slams into the shadow monster.  Talons pinning, shrill cry escaping, and Yuuya watches in horror, fascination, as Shun’s beak slams down on the monster’s neck, as black blood arcs and splatters.

When Shun’s back in his human form, tightening up the old bandages that sorely need to be changed, Yuuya spots it.  Colorful marker used to make dull white pop, stained and smudged by red.

(He had patched it with plain white bandages that he decorated in colorful marker, let it stay, and one day when its wing had healed it flew away)

Oh.

“So that’s what you are.”

Shun doesn’t deny it.

  
**02**

After Serena’s kiss, after seeing what Shun is, learning what he is, Yuuya finds that there’s more.

That the creatures that lurk, roam, and prowl are a norm, that Serena is in fact something else and that Shun is born from “wishes and stars and dreams.”

“And what a strong dream he had,” Serena tells Yuuya.  “I couldn’t bring myself to eat it.”

She still hasn’t explained her kiss, despite a whim.  

“I’ll think of something that it will be for, one day,” she tells Yuuya.  A disgruntled Shun stands by his side.  “But maybe, perhaps, you can think of something it will be for as well.”

“Can I use it as payment for information?” the question is quick to come from Yuuya’s lips.

“Shun’s told you all you need to know,” Serena says.  Yuuya doesn’t think “imagination” and “reality” and “dreams and nightmares” explains much.  

Serena’s looking at one of the bottles in her collection, fingers pulling the cork keeping it sealed off.

“You should say more than that,” Shun adds, but Serena says nothing.  Just grins.

 

 


	4. Afternoon

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He fancies it a game, trying to figure them out, but he also wants to know

With discovering Shun again, with trying to figure out what Serena is and what those nebulae in bottles she had are, Yuuya finds himself spending more time with Shun.

Sometimes he’d find the bird perched high on a building, other times he’s taken Shun back to his apartment, where he’ll crash on the couch and just listen to Yuuya ramble.  It’s odd, thinking on it, that the bird whose song Yuuya had been so fond of when younger would end up this prickly man in a tattered coat.

“Why did you leave?” Yuuya asks one day.

“Hm?”

“When I took care of you.”

Silence.

“I would have died.”

“But you’re alive.”

“I am.”

Yuuya leaves it at that.  He’s not sure what more he can ask for, when it seems beings such as Shun and Serena seem to find it more favorable to answer in riddles and half answers.  So Yuuya treats it like a game, a puzzle, putting together piece after piece so that he can have the full picture.

Obviously, Shun is related to the creatures that lurk about.

Obviously, Serena is also related, as it seemed she also had a hand in making Shun what he is.

_I couldn’t eat a dream like that._

“Why did you save me that one time?” Yuuya changes to a different topic.  He’s got his back pressed to the couch, staring at a black TV screen, and listening to Shun’s even breathing.

“You saved me twice,” Shun tells him.  “Returning the favor.”

“So why did you stay?”

“Why not?”

_After all, I stayed as long as I did as a bird for a reason._

It’s left unsaid, but Yuuya understands the message loud and clear.  He finds a hand reaching up for Shun’s, pulling it close so he can let his cheek rest in the palm.

Shun does nothing to stop him.

  
**01**

“A guardian angel, perhaps?” Yuuya asks, leaning over the railing of the stairs leading up to the park to stare at Shun.

The bird man is covered in more small creatures, these looking like tiny puppy dog tadpoles.  Shun’s absentmindedly petting one that had crawled up on his shoulder.

“What makes you think that?” Shun doesn’t even look up, staring off in the distance at a pocket of shadows in between some buildings.

“Well,” Yuuya starts, “Serena said you were made from wishes and stars and dreams--that’s kind of angel like.  Oh!  So is she an angel too?”

Shun snorts, “The furthest thing from it.”

“Then what would that make you then?”  Yuuya wants to know, he wants to figure out what it is that makes up Shun.  He wants to know what makes up this entity that once kept him company, that once saved Yuuya.

He yelps when a creature is tossed up to him, laughing and giggling.

He catches it on instinct.

“I’m Imagination,” Shun says.  “As Serena would have called me.”

  
**02**

“A demon, maybe?”

“Not that, either.”

Shun’s just finished taking down another of what Yuuya’s dubbed “Nightmares.”  The creature is writhing, the last of its life slipping away, and when it’s dead Shun’s back to being human.  If not an angel, then possibly a demon.

Yuuya walks around the legs of one of the taller creatures (the ones he’s dubbed “Dreams”) to catch up with Shun.

“Tengu, then!”

“No.”

“Siren?”

“Not at all.”

“Harpy--”

Yuuya yelps as Shun cuffs him over the head.  It’s a light hit, but enough to have him rubbing at his head.  “What was that for?” he whines.

“I’m just a bird,” Shun tells him.  “A bird you saved.”

  
**03**

Yuuya observes Serena more closely, watches how she picks up glass bottles and arranges them daintily around her usual spot.  

He keeps on watching as she and Shun interact, tries to pick up more verbal cues from what she says, how she speaks.

“You’re over complicating things,” she tells him one day.  She has Shun stocking some shelves in the back, and all Yuuya can hear is muffled cursing.

“Over complicating?” he asks her.  “I just want to know.”

“It’s not that hard to figure out,” Serena’s picking up another bottle, examining the small cluster of stars inside.  “Shun’s not too different from them--”

“He’s a bird, he told me.”

“Born from a dream, just like these tiny creatures are.”

Yuuya stares at her, and then back to where Shun’s trying to get tiny creatures off of him while he works.

  
**04**

“Serena says that you’re made from dreams and stuff,” Yuuya’s sitting next to Shun in some place not too far from his school.  He’s got his hands in his lap, and Shun’s presence is incredibly close.

“I am,” Shun doesn’t deny it.  “It’s thanks to her I’m here, really.”

“She’s the one who found you?” Yuuya feels an ache, as if it’s something he hadn’t thought about.  Then again he’s never really thought of the relationship between Serena and Shun, too caught up as he is in his game of trying to figure them out.  Too caught up in the presence that is Kurosaki Shun.

A bird Yuuya had saved once.

He looks at Shun’s arm to stare at the bandages and how they just sit there over the sleeve of Shun’s coat.  Or Shun’s coat just doesn’t have a sleeve where the bandages are.  They’re old, and they need to be changed, but Yuuya remembers the crude drawings he had placed there in hopes that it would help Shun’s wing heal faster.

“Why don’t you change those bandages?” Yuuya asks.

“Because they’re my dream.”


	5. Evening

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He realizes everything

“I’m seeing why you adore this human so,” Serena places one of the bottles back down, a label placed on it and simply titled “Infant.”  She’s been labeling the bottles around her recently, been placing names to nebulae and small stars just born.

“From kissing him?”

“You sound irritated,” Serena doesn’t say anything past that.  She just holds out her hand.

Shun digs into the crate next to him and hands her another bottle.

“Why did you kiss him, anyways?”

“Wouldn’t you?”

Shun doesn’t answer her.

  
**01**

“Why do you stay around me?” Shun asks Yuuya.  The human has--valiantly--been trying to guess what Shun is.  With little to no success.

“Because I like to,” Yuuya answers.  They’re in his apartment, Shun lying on Yuuya’s couch and drawing simple patterns on the ceiling with his eyes.  Yuuya is still leaning against the couch, his cheek cradled in Shun’s hand.

“You have better things to do, I’m sure.”

“And you go off and you kill things.”

Shun keeps quiet on that.

“You follow,” he doesn’t really like it.  “Why?”

“It’s...exciting?” He feels Yuuya shrug.

Exciting.

Shun gets up.

“Hey, where--”

“I’m not going to be your cheap thrill,” those things are dangerous.  

“I didn’t--Shun, wait--”

He’s out the door before he can finish hearing anything else.

  
**02**

“Lovers spat?”

Serena asks him when he walks back into her shop.  She’s already strung up vivid red curtains around the room, gold garland around shelves, and her bottles upon bottles of stars nestled in flowers that will never die.

“No.”

“Seems like it.”

He’s come back from hunting, body covered in the gore of the darker beasts.

“There’s something else, anyways,” he tells her.

“And does it have to do with what you’re hiding?”

“I’m hiding nothing,” but he pulls out a small kitten, trembling and weak.  Serena looks amused, taking it from Shun’s hands and holding it up.

“Oh, and this one--I sense a dream similar to yours.”

“You’re not thinking of eating it, are you?”

Serena scoffs, “Of course not.”  

And she does the same thing she did for Shun all those years ago.  A human in place of the black cat, weak and frail.

“A being born from wishes and stars and dreams,” she tells the newcomer.  “Welcome to this world, Yuuto.”

But Serena pauses.

“Shun,” she says, helping Yuuto up.  “Perhaps your adoration of your human has caused your own dreams to rub off on this one.”

“What do you mean?”

She turns Yuuto around to show him.

Shun sees Yuuya’s face looking right back at him.

  
**03**

Yuuya still somehow manages to find Shun, and each time Shun successfully evades him.

Yuuto has adjusted well, joining Shun on his daily rounds.  The beasts born from shadows have lessened, and the creatures made from dreams prosper.

“But you know him?” Yuuto asks, curious about the one who shares his face.

“He saved me, once.”

“Then why don’t you talk to him, that’s kind of dumb, avoiding him.”

Yuuto is no nonsense, gentle, things that are similar to Yuuya and different all the same.  They’ve forged a tentative friendship, and Serena is fond of him.  Most likely due to the fact Yuuto once was a cat left to die after getting caught in the jaws of a beast.

“To keep him safe.”

They run into another creature after that, and Yuuto takes it down with surprising efficiency.

Shun doesn’t need Yuuya hurt because of his own mess ups, because Yuuya is seeking cheap thrills.

_And maybe that’s what truly hurts Shun, the idea he’s just a single thrill in the short years of Yuuya’s life._

  
**04**

“You should talk to him tonight,” Yuuto says, after they once again avoid Yuuya.  He’s frowning, irritated, and Shun wonders if because Yuuto had some of Shun’s own dreams rubbed off on him, has that lingering affection Shun holds for Yuuya, he senses Yuuya’s unease.  Serena has always been vague on that which is born from stars, and so the amount of Yuuya that’s in Yuuto is unsure.

“Is it because you’re tired of him following?”

“No,” and Yuuto looks at Shun with knowing eyes, “because you’ll be less grumpier if you do.”

And Yuuto disappears, leaving Shun behind.  

A cat’s way of saying to solve it all himself.

Shun stares at the bandages on his arm, thinks about when he was saved, way back when he had only been a bird, and how he had become helplessly attached.

Uselessly attached.

Maybe he should get them replaced, these bandages.

  
**05**

Yuuya doesn’t really give Shun a choice this go around.

Yuuto’s left him alone, and when Yuuya sees a chance he’s apparently the type to take it.  Shun finds himself on the ground, a human on top of him, and various creatures observing.  He sees floating feathers of things around them, staring with curious eyes at a beast born from dreams being pinned by a human.

“I understand, why you got upset,” Yuuya’s voice sounds ready to crack.

“You do.”

“It did seem like that, didn’t it?”

“In a ways.”

Yuuya doesn’t say anything else past that.  He just leans down to press a kiss to Shun’s lips, too soft and too gentle and Shun thinks about how he had been saved so long ago.  Saved by a simple fourteen year old boy who he had grown hopelessly attached to.

Had fallen hopelessly in love with.

Shun returns the kiss.

“I’ve also figured everything out,” Yuuya tells Shun.  “What you are, what made you, what Serena is--”

“And what have you discovered.”

“You’re--”


	6. Midnight

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A being made from wishes and stars and dreams.

They replace Shun’s bandages.

Yuuya undoes the old ones slowly, careful of where it’s stuck to Shun’s skin because of years of grime and dried blood.  The marker he had used to color on the plain white ones is non-existent, and Yuuya’s glad for Shun to finally be rid of the sordid bandages.

They’re in Serena’s shop, Yuuya with a fresh roll of gauze and more markers with the intention of drawing everything he could on them.  His love, his adoration, his thanks--

“What an odd thing to do,” Serena comments, idly drawing half moons and stars over the colorful blotches she had placed there in imitation of the nebulae she keeps in her bottles.  “What would the point of decorating these be?”

“It makes them more colorful to look at,” Yuuya comments, cleaning up ugly gashes that would have ruined normal human men, but instead show the strength Shun carries in his bones.

“It’s kind of fun,” is Yuuto’s own comment, his own drawings on the bandages being that of small cats and snatches of things he remembers in a previous life.  

“Is this really necessary?” Shun asks, trying to pull his arm way from Yuuya and the cold wet of the alcohol wipe.

“It is,” Yuuya tells him, fingers smoothing over feathers and scarred skin.  He presses his forehead to Shun’s shoulder.  “It really is.”

Shun doesn’t say anything, gives a disgruntled snort and lets Yuuya continue his work.  At the end of it all, Yuuya wraps the fresh (and freshly colored on) bandages around Shun’s arm, over his shoulder and around his chest.  Shun wears nebulae on his shoulders, wears memories and love.

Truly, Yuuya thinks, he is a being made from wishes and stars and dreams.

He couldn’t have been luckier.


End file.
